The Pathetic State of RSS Readers or why Mike Flies at Night

There are none. Evolution used to have one. And it was my favourite. Feature. Ever. The gdesklets (no link, see rest of sentence) just suck. They’re unstable and they keep crashing. And there’s no standalone any more that I know of. I think surfraw used to be it, but it’s apparently dead upstream. So now, I’m thinking of going back to Claws because there is an rss reader plugin available for it. In order to do the migration, though, I have to make my laptop into a mailserver, to put all the mail from evo into it (over imap) and then read it into sylpheed. That’s a good thing to do anyway, but I was hoping to do it on a proper server box. Ah well.

Any you know, I’m pissed off because I missed the first 13 chapters of Night Flight Mike, which is the newest novella from the venerable CheeseBurger Brown, whose writing I just can’t get enough of. If I’m nonresponsive for a while, it’s because I’m catching up on Night Flight Mike.

Moving to Mefa and Thoughts of Rochacha, and The Best Chinese Food Ever

Well, the lease at the old place was up on the 31st of last month. We were going to move in to this new complex that got built this summer. Unfortunately, the business practices of the management company left a bit to be desired (not least of which falls under deceptive business). Anyway, we found a place in Medford (which everyone tells me is actually pronounced Mefa), and moved in last week. Well, we moved in to the kitchen, anyway, while the hardwood floors got re-done. That is to say, Daniel, Justin and Dave did most of the heavy lifting, including hefting the mattresses up to the second floor porch using rock-climbing gear. Then we promptly took off to go to Rainchester to see my sister for a few days.

While there, I took Aimee to my alma mater, and also to where I did most of the work for my Master’s. We also got to see the abandoned ferry to Canada. That’s pork barrel, right there. And of course, we ate at Ming’s, whose noodles are still to die for. Nowhere else have I had superior Chinese food. That’s right, people, the gauntlet has been thrown down.

We got back into town last night, and spent all of today cleaning, unpacking and applying contact paper. I love contact paper, it rocks. And now, we wait ’til Friday for the cable company to come by and connect the internet pipes to the house. The place is much bigger — two bedrooms, a sunroom/study, living room, dining room, kitchen, washing machine. Makes our old place look like a cardboard box.

Complex Processing, Contests, Jobs

Actually, looking back at the last 3 blog posts that I’ve made, I’ve pretty much given away who exactly I’ll be working for 🙂 In fact, one person out there guessed correctly.

Anyway, when I found the posting on the search engine, I sent in my resume with a cover letter, I stalked HR over on LinkedIn, and then finally I went into the place physically with another letter telling them why I was Seemant Kulleen. 7 interviews and a few weeks later, they asked me to work with them on a contract to come up with rules and judging guidelines for their contest. It’s actually a pretty sweet contest, with a ten thousand dollar cash prize at the end of it, with weekly one thousand dollar prizes before it.

I advised them on the rules and guidelines and indeed made two specific requests:

  • deflashify the front page
  • don’t launch browser windows on clicks, let everything live in the same window

For those of you who did go to that site before and after, you’ll notice the difference. I think it’s a lot more user friendly now, don’t you?

And now, it’s a few weeks later, and I’m joining their full time staff. I can not tell you how excited I am about this. I think the technology is fantastic, and I think the scope for growth and emergence of a standard for StreamSQL is tremendous. Let’s face it, people, the amounts of information that need to get processed are just growing. Fast. There are needs all over the place to process as much of it as fast as possible. And StreamBase, to me, seems to have the best position to do just that.

In the next episode, I’ll talk a little more about their technology and why I got all excited about it.

Conti-NEW-ation

Over the past 6 months or more, I’ve been thinking about where I’m headed, what I’m doing, and what I’d like to be doing. This is mainly career related, I guess. Comes from being in your thirties, maybe? Anyway, I looked back over the 5 odd years I’ve been with Gentoo, and I realised that what I enjoyed most about being with Gentoo was the developer relations stuff. Not the firing and all that crap, no. The stuff about building relationships. The stuff that involved scoping out new people and engaging them on different development issues. The stuff that essentially defines who I am, really. That is to say, the stuff that is my personality anyway.

And so I decided that that is where I must go. So I started reading through the more interesting and pertinent entries on reddit and of course, Guy Kawasaki’s blog amongst other things. Guy had a great post about evangelism in which he mentioned simplyhired, the vertical search engine. I tried it out and sure enough, there were/are more tech links than religious links.

Anyway, all that led me to find this one opportunity that is located right in town. It was perfect. They wanted an evangelist, and a Developer Relations Manager. How perfect is that? They may as well have advertised, “We’re looking for a Seemant Kulleen to do what he does.” Lemme tell you, I hopped to that opportunity.

Tomorrow: the conclusion. maybe.

Newness

I’ve been really really quiet lately. I’ve ignored Rach, I’ve ignored James, I’ve ignored my new old friend Gordana in the emails. And I’ve ignored the blog. I haven’t been bullskipping or anything like that, though. I’ve been fairly occupied and busy.

First off, Aimee and I are moving out of our current digs and into a new apartment. Our current landlords are great, but the apartment is a little small for us. So we’re looking for a bigger place. We were going to move into another complex, but the company there has questionable business practises (they employ the bait-and-switch technique very very effectively). I won’t link to them, as I don’t need to be sending traffic their way. So we looked instead at a privately owned place and we really liked it, so hopefully we’ll be able to move in there. With two days to go on this lease, the pressure’s high!

As you know, Daniel is now here for a year. He’ll be working at Brontes. Yes, that’s right, I did not say “with me” even though that has been the plan throughout. Actually, I resigned my position at Brontes on Thursday.

I highly enjoyed working with the team at Brontes. Ed is easily the best VP of Engineering I’ve ever worked under. Phil was a fantastic team leader, and Dave is a great guy to work with.
I made some good friends at Brontes: Joe, Barbara, Janos, Tong, Justin, Dave, Tom, Brandon, Adam (I’m missing a url for Joe, but I’ll fill it in later).

Suffice it to say, I’ll miss them all terribly. It’s bittersweet, this parting of ways. I’m going to a new exciting opportunity that I’ve wanted for a long long time, and I’d kind of reached the end of where I wanted to be in Software Engineering.

The new opportunity? Ha, I’ll keep you guessing until I post the next installment.

Complex Event Processing

So, in my learnings and conversations with people over the past week, I’ve just discovered this concept of Complex Event Processing. It’s a fascinating subject — taking a fast moving data stream and performing analysis of it in real time. I’m looking at a (PowerPoint alert!) presentation that say they achieve a 1msec lag in some cases using an on-the-fly db with SQL-like syntax.

This is truly fascinating business. Anyone out there in blogland into this CEP stuff. Tell me all about it, educate me.

Gentoo Tests Your Hardware (and podcasting)

Long time no blog — life’s been busy and crazy, no time to breathe even. World Cup takes up my free time these days: after work, school and homework.

Just wanted to check in and mention the webcast that a few of us were on the Linux Link Tech show last night pimping about Gentoo. Whew that’s a lotta links for one sentence.

True to form, because there were four of us, we kinda stressed their asterisk server. Actually, between the network lag and the dropped call, I’m not sure how coherent any of us were. Judge for yourself I suppose 🙂

Pat and the gang were just great though. Very gracious hosts, and it was a pleasure being on there. I’ve never been on the radio before, and this was a great first time!

Go England (in the World Cup), else Go Ghana, else Go Argentina, else Go Brazil.

South East Asian Restaurant

Heh, it’s not a generic description, it’s the actual name of the place. I went there this week for lunch with a friend of mine and with Aron and his lovely wife, Amy. Now before I get into my mini-review/ranking of the place, let me just say this. All this seeming obsession with food has got a purpose. And this post shows that purpose. More after the nitty gritty. (I should sell advertising in this space right here, shouldn’t I?).

Aron told us all about xen and ia64 and his work involving both. Amy told us about her recent work with inotify. She’s modest so she described it as “some stuff”. The link and details are from Aron. And me, I have no shame, so I’m boasting on her behalf as well. And of course Justin regaled us with some comedy.

The food itself — for the price you simply can not complain. They have a great variety of stuff, and even for the vegetarians among us. All the meateaters (which consisted of everyone except for Aron, Amy and me) were pretty happy with it. Spicy food galore! Yummy and tasty, and I’m going back there for sure. The Griffises mentioned another Indian veg. restaurant in the area that we’ve been looking for but never seem to find. We always wind up at other Indian restaurants that have sprouted up in this one restaurant’s former locations. That includes the new #1 in Framingham. Go figure.

Now the reason? Great food, great company, great opportunities to get together with Gentoo developers and other smart people to talk about technology, linux, gentoo and so on. I always find these things very refreshing and energising. Notice how I met up with Aron yesterday and fixed a couple of bugs. I think that’s a pattern.

And so there you have it, mystery solved. I’ll hopefully put up a recipe for Rach soon.

UTemptations with XTerm

Just a quick note, while I’m on lunch break waiting for the missus, watching a few Dennis Bergkamp, about xterm and the virtual/utempter.

I’ve switched all xterms to finally depend specifically on libutempter and not virtual/utempter (which was defaulted to sys-apps/utempter, but that has changed). I’ll be killing sys-apps/utempter entirely, as it is unmaintained upstream, and has bugs. A while after that, the virtual will disappear as well. The bugs for reference are: 75943 and 115533.

Edit: Added links. Food blog to follow

That Ol’ Globus

I’m not talking here about the second half of Golan-Globus productions (who brought you notable gems like Ninja 3: The Domination and Cobra, of course). I’m talking about the Grid Computing framework. So I’m taking a class at Boston University this summer about Grid Computing, and the prof. is going to have us work with the Globus toolkit. Now, since you can install the entire toolkit on linux (but only the java client on winders), I thought I’d try and ebuild it. Turns out, some people already have. Tried, that is.

OMG WTF. I mean seriously. How do you, as a package maintainer, deal with this. I’m talking about the upstream developers — how do they deal with this convoluted build system? Why package all the perl module dependencies with the actual package itself? People have heard of CPAN (gentoo users have it easy), you know. And poor Hanni (on the bug) — this is their first ebuild. My first ebuild was for yahoo messenger, and as simple as that was, matthewbk had to help me with it. So, shout out to Hanni for bravery. A big thumbs down to the globus upstream for an excruciating package (not the contents, just the way to install/configure the contents).

Someone on the bug suggested breaking the ebuilds up into separate components. I would urge the globus people themselves to release it as a suite of components and have mercy on distro maintainers who want to package the thing. The bug request has been in our bugzilla for two years now. Mainly because it’s a b*tch to package.

Update: I just found this article about someone’s exploration into grid computing. Good read.